By Sandra Vo, Staff Writer
Picture this. You’re a clumsy girl who’s never quite fit in, and you’ve just transferred high schools (again) and now you find yourself trying to navigate this unfamiliar environment with all of your textbooks held tightly against your chest. Due to an unfortunate accident just before your first day of school, your thick glasses have been cracked and taped back together with masking tape you pulled from your father’s toolbox. You feel alone in the swarm of people, the misfit of them all.
Then you fall. For seemingly no reason at all, you trip dramatically in the middle of the hallway during passing period, and your books and papers tumble out of your hands and onto the floor. Heat floods your cheeks. Embarrassment can’t even come close to describing the pure humiliation and shame you feel. As expected in a typical high school, there are plenty of snickers and a complete lack of helping hands. Just as you reach for your chemistry textbook, a hot pink Louboutin heel steps right on top of it. You look up, your lips parting in horror.
Here she is. The head honcho of the high school hallway, the princess of the pubescent people, the tyrant of the teenage throng. “Oh ew, I just stepped in nerd,” she sneers, triggering giggles from all around you. It’s the popular mean girl and her two lackeys.
And she’s just marked you as her target.
When people talk about mean girls, the movie Mean Girls rightfully comes to mind. It’s the prime example of a popular girl with skewed morals who seeks to dominate the high school social scene through terrible misguided actions. As always, her two followers echo every word she speaks as if it’s gospel, but why do we see this trope across so many different films and television series? What could possibly be the appeal of an evil version of the Three Musketeers?
In the eyes of the writers, this trope might be seen as an easy way to create an antagonist. Sure, it might not be the most original thing in the world, but the box office ratings have proved time and time again that people will still watch the movie. That proves true in Heathers, The Princess Diaries, and Camp Rock. The existence of the two followers adds to an antagonist’s overall power, since nobody would watch a movie if it looked like the antagonist appeared easily dismissible.
Even the motives behind all the mean girls seem to be lacking in creativity as well. Many of them are jealous of the main character’s talent, rising popularity, or even just because the male lead (that the mean girl usually has a crush on as well) happens to have fallen for the main character. It’s always the same story every time. A group of three girls bully the main character right up until the ending, where they get their dues by public humiliation or falling into a cake or pool (which seems to happen an awful lot).
Isn’t this a waste of the mean girls trope’s potential? The benefits of having tangible antagonists is that they can develop characters of their own, and thus go through their own character development as the story progresses. Why limit them to staying as the three mean girls forever?
For example, take a common situation. The head mean girl is crouching down so that she’s eye-to-eye with the main character, who is kneeling down on the ground after having been freshly humiliated in front of the entire school. The two girls are close enough for the mean girl to maliciously whisper something to the main character without anyone else overhearing. Most writers view this as the main confrontation that will lead to the eventual climax of the story, but doesn’t it also build up something else?
Doesn’t it reek of sexual tension?
However, the relationship between the main character and the mean girls can also safely morph into a platonic one. For every antagonist created, there is potential for a redemption arc as well. Writers could even make the mean girls form a pact with the main character by introducing a different villain that forces them to unite together.
There’s isn’t necessarily anything wrong with having three mean girls in a story, but their potential never seems to hit the heights that it could reach. Just because mean things come in threes doesn’t mean they always have to end that way.